1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally concerns wireless messaging and data services, and in more particular concerns a method and system for monitoring the data delivery performance of various wireless service providers, devices, and applications and automatically analyzing the monitoring results to provide recommendations to service providers to assist them in improving their wireless offerings.
2. Background Information
The use of wireless communications has grown at an astounding rate, and is predicted to continue to grow, with no end in sight. While most of the present bandwidth for wireless communications is used for voice traffic, more and more data is being sent over the airways, and the increased availability of wireless web contact and wireless messaging has placed increasing pressure on service providers.
While the demand for data access over wireless communications networks continues to escalate, the available bandwidth and quality of service provided by present wireless communications technology has not kept pace. Moreover, network complexity and diversity has increased, making the challenge of maintaining quality of service for wireless data networks, applications, and services even more difficult. As a result, network access is often delayed or even unavailable during peak usage periods, and connections are often dropped. It is predicted that these types of problems will only grow worse, leaving customers frustrated and unsatisfied.
The present market for wireless providers is highly competitive, with each provider seemingly offering more minutes for the same base rate every three to six months. In general, it is this selling point that is emphasized. In many instances, the cell phone a person purchased will only work with a certain provider, and those providers have recognized that once they get a new customer, that customer is likely to stay, at least on part because the customer doesn""t want to throw away a perfectly good phone in order to switch to a new service provider. In addition, most service agreements are between six months and two years, with substantial penalties for dishonoring the agreement.
Marketing research indicates that many users would be willing to pay higher service fees for improved performance, e.g., shorter latencies and less dropped connections. In addition, it would be highly advantageous for those service providers that provide higher quality service to be able to advertise this fact when they are trying to attract new customers. While the service providers can publish performance results corresponding to their own criteria, there is no method that is available for objectively measuring the performance level of the various service providers. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a bias-free means for measuring the performance of the various service providers in the wireless communications industry.
The present invention provides a method and system for monitoring wireless data service performance of wireless service providers. Data messages are sent from a plurality of remote and/or local monitoring probes to other monitoring probes. In general, the remote monitoring probes will be distributed throughout a service area(s) from the service provider and include both fixed probes and mobile probes, wherein each probe will include one or more wireless devices, including cellular phones, PSC phones, PDA devices, Blackberry devices, and the like. Various performance data are then measured, including message deliver latency and network accessibility. This data is then sent from the remote monitoring probes to one or more central monitoring stations, where it is stored and aggregated to generate performance reports and alerts, which are delivered to the service providers or may be accessed through a web user interface. In addition, wireless Internet access service performance is monitored using the remote and local monitoring probes, wherein various access functions are performed using WAP-enabled wireless devices.